Dress-up, drink-up: An inside look into Cardiff’s sacred Wednesday night out

At Cardiff University Wednesday nights are sacred and for societies, it is the pinnacle of our week.

On Wednesdays, the libraries empty earlier, the alcohol shelves in Cathays Lidl are rapidly cleared, and there is an unmissable buzz around Cathays as everyone gets ready for their socials. When 4pm hits, it is time to finish anything uni-related for the day and hop in the shower.

Socials start significantly earlier than any normal night out, with a strict arrival time and penalties set if you fail to show up on time. Of course, this has to factor in ample time to dress for whatever insane theme you may have been given that week.

It is not unusual to see groups dressed as British icons, celeb crushes, boys dressed in nothing more than bed sheets claiming to be Greek gods or girls walking around in their Victoria Secret silks for a pyjama party theme.

For my last social of 2024, I had to dress as my degree for Socsci Netball. My housemate, who studies French, had an easy job. Stick on a beret, striped top and a baguette and she was sorted. I, on the other hand, had to somehow dress as a philosopher, a challenge I look forward to every week.

We headed over to one of the society member’s houses for 6pm sharp, avoiding a penalty at all costs, where the living room was already full of girls, drinks in hand. This early in the night socials are as the name suggests, a chance to meet with your friends and find your new best friend for the night, that you will probably never see again.

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At pres, you typically speak to most people at some point throughout the night. Naturally, this Wednesday’s main conversation starter was “what degree are you?” after assessing someone’s ambiguous costume and then the games begin.

We started with a classic game of Waterfall, where the rules are as follows: Get into two lines, drinks at the ready. Wait for the go-ahead, then the first person in the line has to down their drink, as soon as they finish the next person in the line does the same, and so on.

At the end of the game, all members of the losing team have a beard drawn on their faces. More drinking games followed to prepare us for the dreaded YOLO queue in the cold. Another key experience for any Cardiff Uni student on a Wednesday out.

Despite our best efforts to arrive at the SU at 8pm on the dot, there was already a line longer than the building itself. So we joined the other angry socials at the back of the queue, where conversations tend to focus on complaining that “it never used to be this bad” (it was), and trying to get that one friend to look sober enough to actually get passed the bouncers and into YOLO.

Finally, into YOLO we go, ready to drink our weight in VKs and get squashed and separated on the dance floor for the next two hours.

Once you have outdanced yourself or the VKs have finally hit, it is time to collect those who have stayed all night and head to your chosen kebab shop for your post-YOLO meal. Will it be a T&A’s where you are likely to be caught off guard by their TikTok live stream or a Mama’s? You will probably regret both in the morning either way.

Then when you are all happily fed it is time to debate whether you want to brave the weather conditions or treat yourself to a cheeky Uber to get to bed faster.

When you finally arrive home it is time for bed, if you can still walk that far, where you can dream of the next Wednesday night’s social when you get to do it all over again.